Announcing the Shapely Prose community site, or, I hope you have some time to kill

Attention Shapelings! Remember how, a while back, we asked you what you wanted to see next out of Shapely Prose, and then you told us all kinds of things, and then we got stressed out and stopped posting much? Good times. Well, one of the most frequently expressed wishes was to have a place where Shapelings could connect with each other off-blog for chatting, meetups, and just generally extending the community we’ve built here.

Good news, everyone! Starting now, such a magical site of happiness exists. Rev up your clickin’ finger and head on over to:

If you don’t have a Ning account already, you should be able to join here.

Obviously, we still encourage your participation via comments here on the blog! But when you want to hook up with other Shapelings, talk about something off-topic, post photos, or do whatever, we think you’ll like the new Ning site. And if you don’t, there’s a forum thread called “Suggestion Box” where you can tell us how to make it better.

We expect the community site to be largely self-regulating. If it is as useful to you as we hope it will be, then it will be too busy for us to monitor all the forums. Obviously, there won’t be a benevolent dictator there as there is here, but we hope that you will abide by the community guidelines established in our comments policy in terms of language, respect, and trolls. If things get out of hand, we’ll revisit the idea of moderation.

So head on over, try things out, and have fun! You’ll notice some content on there already, as we invited a few Shapelings to test drive for a while before opening it to all y’all. Thank you to our fabulous beta testers (you know who you are) for helping us out. See you on Ning!

If you have any questions or concerns about the new site, please direct them to me via email (my address is in the sidebar).